On Friday, Notre Dame announced that their commencement speaker would be none other than POTUS Barack Obama (aAAaaw, lucky!)

It took conservative Catholics all of two days to react negatively, reminding Notre Dame that Barack Obama is “a president who has put the United States back into the business of funding abortion abroad [and] made a mockery of the very idea of moral argument in his speech announcing federal funding for embryo-destructive stem cell research” (that’s George Weigel, a Pope JPII biographer).

The National Review Online snapped into action and invited comments from Catholic thinkers re: “Should the University of Notre Dame honor our most anti-life president.” Georgetown’s own James V. Schall, SJ, was among those to reply. See if you can make out his feelings based on his response [paraggraphing mine]:

When a university invites anyone to its campus to present a commencement address, it honors the person chosen. Likewise, the invitation itself indicates what the inviting institution thinks of itself, of what it, as an institution, considers to be worthy of honor. Some people would not be invited; others would not accept. Those invited do not accept every invitation. When they do accept, they indicate that it is worth their while to give the said address and receive the said honor.

Clearly, some things are incompatible with honor, others are incompatible with truth, the purpose of a university. Aristotle says that the highest reward of the politician is honor, something more coveted than power or wealth. Honor is something the politician seeks, even covets. The academic, for his part, longs for recognition. He wants his often obscure work to be “appreciated.” The polity has its own rewards, its own honors.

The accepting of the honor to the president evidently meets his purposes. The awarding it seems to meet the purposes of the university. Some say that it is a perfect fit. Others suspect that both parties, in accepting and giving such honors, manage to demean each other in what each is, in truth, expected to stand for.

And then there are unknown unknowns. He isn’t letting ND off the hook as it tries to dissociate its invitation to Barack from their support of his positions (fair?). But is Fr. Schall a “some,” or is this his coy way of saying he’s an “other”? Let your Madlib decide after the jump!

This entry was posted on Monday, March 23rd, 2009 at 6:56 pm and is filed under Vox Populi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.